But it made me think. Terrible thing, I know. Thing is, I like romance in the purest sense--stories about relationships that are sexual, romantic, or both. (Which isn't to say that I don't like stories about platonic relationships as well.) But I don't like the standardized formula of Quirky Comedy or Bland Situational Drama that romance stories these days are usually shoved into, and I don't like shoehorning romance into every big movie/whatever ever even when it doesn't fit.
So I get into the romance subplots in stories that are primarily non-romantic in focus, and I wind up writing romantic, or at least pairing-based, fanfiction for these series. Because I like love stories, but I'm not into romance as a genre, or at least what it is today.
I wonder how many other people this also holds true for, and how much it accounts for the way fandom obsesses over pairings. Sure, a lot of it is just sparkly-eyed teenage girls attempting to shove the same romance cliches that I just said I don't like into series where they don't belong, because Everything Has To Be About Romance. But how much of it is an attempt to reclaim the concept of the love story from the morass of the romance genre?
I have no idea how much of that made sense, by the way.
